The online El Dorado

I’ve been lurking some forums for years and I’ve seen all sorts of people, websites and projects come and go.

The majority of those willing to start an online project are motivated by the fact that others could do it and after doing it they are living a fancy life financed only by a handful of websites.

I won’t doubt that because I know people making lots of money from their websites alone. However at the same time I’m well aware of the volumes of work, research and dedication a project needs to be successful.

If you go on well established forums and check out the projects presented there that are older than 1 year you will see that 9 out of 10 are either completely abandoned or have failed.

I’ve known people that believed they could make a shitload of cash with zero investment only by dedicated some of their time to put up a website and those people were the first that failed.

Just as I concluded in my previous case study, making something that’s profitable online is costly because just as Americans say: you must spend money to make money.

With all my experience in this field I learned that in order to thrive with an online project you must always follow a set of basic guidelines:

• Make a plan, a good plan because simply wanting to make money with a website is not a plan;
• Set a timeframe and a budget because to make it work you need to invest both time and money;
• Evaluate all your assets and if you don’t know what you’re doing or what you’re supposed to do then don’t do it;
• Don’t go for cheap. Most shared hosting offers are good for HTML sites or sites with less than 100 daily visitors. If you’re using WordPress then go for a hosting designed for WordPress or for a VPS, cloud or dedicated server. I still see people believing that they can run Youtube like sites on a $2 shared hosting plan.
• Don’t expect instant profit or ROI. A good site that makes good money takes time to build and time to maintain. If you have what it takes then you can make it profitable within the 1st year. If you don’t and give up after 1st year then you should not start another project because most probably you’ll fail in the very same way.
• Don’t copy/paste. Seriously don’t, because if you do then you’ll surely have short term success.
• Don’t take everything you read online for granted. There are a lot of false prophets haunting the online just as it happens in real life. So before taking anything for granted do you research and corroborate the claim with different sources.
• Don’t spam. Whatever you do just don’t spam because you’ll just end up being a disgrace.
• Prepare for failure, not for success. This will keep you motivated and going strong.

If you made it this far don’t expect me to sell you an ebook teaching you how to make millions on autopilot because this is not what this blog post is about. It’s all about you and your online aspirations and the way you should perceive things.